From: Jeff Davis (jdavis@socketscience.com)
Date: Wed Sep 08 1999 - 13:44:06 MDT
In his reply to den Otter,
Robert J. Bradbury (bradbury@www.aeiveos.com)
Tue, 7 Sep 1999 20:27:13 -0700 (PDT) writes:
>I'm not sure that this is the "consensus". If we got the exponential
growth of nanoassembly
>tomorrow, we would have *neither* (a) the designs to build stuff, nor (b)
AI to populate the
>nanocomputers.
This seems to suggest that you need ai to populate the nano computers,
and I'm not sure that this is the case. If you have a hierarchical
architecture to control the nanobots, and if that control system is modular
at each point and level in the hierarchy, you might have a much simpler
control system than is suggested by the sometime perception of ai. Shall
we be overawed by what, in our present state of ignorance, we see as the
"complexity" of intelligence only to discover later that it is arises from
not-so-awsomely-complex substructures in a multi-level hierarchy whose
activities are coordinated by an elegant (in an appreciative sense
"simple") somewhat-modifiable feedback system?
I am far from original in repeating that the challenge of artificial
intelligence, still a work in progess (due to insufficient hardware
capability?), may not be so daunting when broken into smaller, dumber
pieces. After all, the apparent intelligence [... ;-) ... ] of humans
emerges from the cellular level through just such a hierarchy. And the
function of the entire body does the same. From the "dumb", deterministic
behaviors of the cellular substructures with their finite, modular
instruction set, arise tissues, organs, and the magnificent
feedback-mediated coordination of the body as a whole.
How "i" does the control system *really* have to be?
Anyway this is my only quibble with Robert's point here. The control
system question is something I puzzle over. Where will it surprise us by
being simple? Where will it surprise us by being complex? I hope others
will help out with this. Robert of course has an unfair advantage in that
he gets to sneak a peek at Nanomedicine ahead of the rest of us. Luckily,
he's on our team.
By the way, speaking of nanocomputers and nonobot control systems: I
spoke, briefly, to Eric Drexler and he mentioned that the speed of
nanocomputers is slow relative to the speed of nanobots. That is compared
for example to the speed of macro computers to the macro machines that they
control. I asked him at Extro4 if this was "a problem" and he said it has
to be dealt with, but that it can be.
Best, Jeff Davis
"Everything's hard till you know how to do it."
Ray Charles
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